The Whole Foods at Trinity Place, at Eighth and Market in San Francisco, is closing its doors one year after opening there, with the company citing the horrible street conditions outside as the reason.

Welp, this is why we can't have nice things. A store that had long been heralded as a potential tipping point for improving conditions on mid-Market, the Whole Foods at Trinity Place, is already closing because those conditions remain very shitty, and chaotic. [Update: That is the company's reasoning, anyway, though some employees suggest there is more to the story, and this was, at base, a business decision.]

The store, on the basement level of the enormous Trinity Place complex (1185 Market Street), opened just over a year ago, in March 2022, and was the second Whole Foods to open on Market Street — the other being about a mile up the street, at 2001 Market.

The SF Standard broke the news of the closure, and got a statement from a Whole Foods rep: "To ensure the safety of our team members, we have made the difficult decision to close the Trinity store for the time being. All team members will be transferred to one of our nearby locations."

The "for the time being" line makes it sound like the store could reopen at some point, but it's not clear what would have to happen to change the company's mind.

The store is set to shut down after close of business Monday evening.

The block of Market Street between Seventh and Eighth streets has been notably more chaotic since the pandemic, with a crowd typically congregating closer to the Seventh Street end, and plenty of open-air drug use and dealing going on.

The Whole Foods announced in November that it was instituting a rule for using its restrooms, which would require showing a receipt to a security guard to prove you had shopped there. Around that same time, the store cut back its hours and began closing two hours earlier, at 7 p.m., out of safety concerns for its employees.

This doesn't bode well for the coming opening of IKEA two blocks down Market, which is set to happen sometime this year. IKEA and its mall development arm are planning to open an urban-scale IKEA store along with a food- and entertainment-focused complex in the six-story building between Fifth and Sixth streets, possibly to be called Livat. Last we heard, the IKEA was set to open ahead of the rest of the complex, possibly by the end of spring.

Top image: Photo by Ann L./Yelp